Finished

rdb on 2013/04/21 21:48 of World Wakers
— edited on 2013/04/21 21:51

Phew, that's that.  This PyWeek has certainly been more intense for me than the last one I participated in, although certainly more fruitful.  I'm rather satisfied with the result; I've learnt a lot and I feel that I could not have done a better job.  I've faced challenges that I had not faced before, which was the primary reason for my participation.

The game turned out to be an action-adventure style game.  There's not an awful lot of content, but there's not a lot of content that one can produce in a week for a game of this style.  But we implemented most of the content that we had planned to make from the start; I was not certain that we would be able to pull this off.

I did most of the modelling in Blender3D, about which I've uttered both praise and curses during the course of the week.  Most of my curses were at the exporter, though, which I've had to modify on several occasions in order to support a particular feature that I wanted.  But in the end, I managed to set up a reasonably working pipeline, that would make adding further content a lot easier if we were to ever pick this up again.  I certainly had a lot of fun with Blender's ambient occlusion baking and with its Ivy Generator, though. ;-)

I had planned from the beginning to push off texturing to the second half of the week so that I could focus on adding more content from the beginning.  This worked out well, but the texturing ended up being pushed off until the last two days, which caused it to become more of a rush job.  I'm satisfied with how it turned out, but it could have been better had I started a day earlier.

Unfortunately, there was an issue with normal and specular mapping on the walls - they simply didn't show up for some reason.  This is a real shame, because the game would have looked so much better with them.  The fact that the lighting system that I hacked up was so incredibly hacky made debugging this complicated.

We also didn't get as much done as we wanted regarding sound.  I didn't get 3D sound working, and we didn't find the right sound files in time.  The code to play the music was added within the last hour of the challenge.  This is a shame, as better sound effects would have added so much more atmosphere to the game.

But aside from all that, I'm pleased with the result, and I hope that it's received favourably.

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Comments

dmreichard on 2013/04/22 07:05:

It would be interesting to read how you came to start using Panda3D, what problems were encountered in the beginning and how those problems were solved. The manual on their main website seems nice, though I have heard from others it isn't actually that good. Either way, this entry was impressive as far as presentation. The visuals looked very well done and the fact that this was done in Python with good frame rate is awesome. I'm sure with another week there could have been more content added to make it even better. Good job!